Recessional - Or, the Time of the Hammer

by Tom McCarthy

Modernist and contemporary literature are marked by a preoccupation with time, specifically with the passage of time characterized by starts and stops and suspended states of waiting. Acclaimed novelist Tom McCarthy brings out a temporal pattern, a subliminal convention of a certain fringe of modernism that works both in and against the canon of modernist literature in works by Thomas Pynchon, J. G. Ballard, Maurice Blanchot, Thomas Mann, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and William Faulkner, as well as in McCarthy’s own fiction.
           
The latest edition in Diaphanes’s THINK ART series, which explores the cultural and theoretical impact of artistic processes, Recessional—Or, the Time of the Hammer opens with an essay by McCarthy on recessional time as an aesthetic element and literary device. This essay is followed by an interview with McCarthy, in which he further discusses his own writing process, taking his most recent novel, Satin Island, as the starting point and casting new light on both avant-garde and realist literature.
           
Praise for Remainder
            “An avant-garde challenge. . . . [McCarthy is] one of the great English novelists of the past ten years.”—Zadie Smith

80 pages, Paperback

First published May 15, 2016

About the author

Tom McCarthy — “English fiction’s new laureate of disappointment” (Time Out, September 2007) — is a writer and artist. He was born in 1969 and lives in a tower-block in London. Tom grew up in Greenwich, south London, and studied English at New College, Oxford. After a couple of years in Prague in the early 1990s, he lived in Amsterdam as literary editor of the local Time Out, and later worked in British television as well as co-editing Mute magazine.

His debut novel Remainder was first published in November 2005 by Paris-based art press Metronome. After becoming a cult hit championed first by British webzines (it was 3:AM Magazine’s Book of the Year for 2005) and then by the literary press, Remainder was republished by Alma Books in the UK (2006) and Vintage in the US (2007). A French version is to be followed by editions in Japanese, Korean, Greek, Spanish and Croatian.

A work of literary criticism, Tintin and the Secret of Literature, was released by Granta Books in June 2006. It also came out in France and an American edition is in the offing.

Tom’s second novel, Men in Space came out in 2007.

He has published numerous stories, essays and articles on literature, philosophy and art in publications including The Observer, The Times Literary Supplement and Contemporary Magazine, as well as in anthologies such as London from Punk to Blair (Reaktion Books), Theology and the Political (Duke University Press) and The Milgram Experiment (Jan van Eyck Press). His story, “Kool Thing, Or Why I Want to Fuck Patty Hearst” appeared in The Empty Page: Fiction Inspired By Sonic Youth (Serpent’s Tail) in 2008.

His ongoing project the International Necronautical Society, a semi-fictitious avant-garde network that surfaces through publications, proclamations, denunciations and live events, has been described by Untitled Magazine as ‘the most comprehensive total art work we have seen in years’ and by Art Monthly as ‘a platform for fantastically mobile thinking’. In 2003 the INS broke into the BBC website and inserted propaganda into its source-code. The following year, they set up a broadcasting unit at the ICA from which more than forty ‘agents’ generated non-stop poem-codes which were transmitted over FM radio in London and by internet to collaborating radio stations around the world.

Tom has also tutored and lectured at various institutions including the Architectural Association, Central Saint Martins School of Art, the Royal College of Art, Goldsmiths College and Southern California Institute of Architecture. He recently taught a course on ‘Catastrophe’ with Marko Daniel at the London Consortium.

Reviews

[Jeroen · Rating 4 out of 5]

It would be an understatement to say that Tom McCarthy wears his influences on his sleeve. Any interview with him is a tapestry of his precursors in modernism and postmodernism and, more significant still, his novels happily appropriate scenes from the works that influenced him. He took the crack in the bathroom wall in Remainder from Jean-Phillipe Toussaint, the episode in the Alpine spa in C from Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain and the end of Satin Island – as he himself here points out – from Balzac's Le Père Goriot. I think this is completely fine, for starters because he is forthright about it, but also because it seems this appropriation is in a sense his project, an idea of modernism as a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk unfolding over time. I recently wrote elsewhere about the Lautreamontian method, and it seems to apply here: “clasp an author’s sentence tight, eliminate a false idea, and replace it with the right idea.” The flipside of this coin is represented by the famous Borges story about Pierre Menard, the man who decided to rewrite Don Quixote word for word, only to conclude that even though he wrote the same words, it wasn't the same text. We could combine these two methods and say: “Clasp an author’s sentence tight, eliminate a false context, and replace it with the right context”.

This sounds a lot like remix culture, a cultural landscape in which the auteur becomes mere reappropriateur. The sense I get from McCarthy is that for him such reappropriation is only natural, for he seems to regard the experience of living as something manifested in text more so than in blood, sweat and tears. In interviews he almost never refers to real experiences; at best he will refer to the real experiences of the authors he is stealing from, as when he speaks of Blanchot's episode before the firing squad – which by the way he lifted from him and dropped into C. Who is Tom McCarthy anyway, one might ask; who were his parents, what are the traumas and ruptures that have defined his life, what has made him the writer he is? The questions do not only lack answers, but they also seem somehow beside the point. McCarthy has mentioned multiple times that he considers Mallarmé the most important writer of modern times, particularly pointing to the latter's idea that “everything exists to end up in a book.” Yet of course, for a long time now, everything already exists in books. This is the great tragedy of the young artist: everything has been done. So what's left? To write – or better yet, conceptualise – that all-encompassing book in which all of it comes together. This is of course the Great Report that U. is trying – and, naturally, failing – to write in Satin Island.

Mallarmé's – and by appropriation, McCarthy's – world view is encapsulated in a wonderful passage from a song by Sunset Rubdown, the Canadian band spearheaded by Spencer Krug. In this song, the singer is more concerned with the conception of his art than the love and life he is actualy living:

She said, “my sails are flapping in the wind.”
I said, “can I use that in a song?”
She said, “I mean the end begins.”
I said, “I know, can I use that too?”

I think we have to understand the subject at hand in Recessional, which is basically the idea of the interval, as an extension of all this. Recessional time, though the author gets to it slowly, seems ultimately to be the time from which the writer holds forth. The great lamentation of the writer: that one cannot write from the event, but only about it. To write while something is happening is to already be removed from it. This is what the song lyric explains so well: the woman is trying to communicate despair, but it is to no avail: he is writing. I was reminded of Ongoingness here, Sarah Manguso's great memoir on diary keeping. “Today was very full,” she writes, “but the problem isn't today. It's tomorrow. I'd be able to recover from today if it weren't for tomorrow. There should be extra days, buffer days, between the real days.” Recessional time is that buffer day, and buffering just so happens to be one of McCarthy's favourite metaphors for all of this. In one of the best passages of Satin Island, U. sees the intricacies of time laid bare in the loading of a video online:

[A]t the bottom of the screen there’d be that line, that bar that slowly fills itself in—twice: once in bold red and, at the same time, running ahead of that, in fainter grey; the fainter section, of course, has to remain in advance of the bold section, and of the cursor showing which part of the video you’re actually watching at a given moment; if the cursor and red section catch up, then buffering sets in again. Staring at this bar, losing myself in it just as with the circle, I was granted a small revelation: it dawned on me that what I was actually watching was nothing less than the skeleton, laid bare, of time or memory itself. Not our computers’ time and memory, but our own. This was its structure. We require experience to stay ahead, if only by a nose, of our consciousness of experience—if for no other reason than that the latter needs to make sense of the former, to (as Peyman would say) narrate it both to others and ourselves, and, for this purpose, has to be fed with a constant, unsorted supply of fresh sensations and events.

Manguso also writes, about her compulsion to take note of everything: “I still needed to record the present moment before I could enter the next one, but I wanted to know how to inhabit time in a way that wasn't a character flaw.” I would say, and I think McCarthy is also getting at that: to write is inherently to inhabit time as a character flaw. Writing is a way of rupturing time, a quixotic attempt at ebbing its flow. In this sense I think there is something tragic about McCarthy and all the authors he adores and cites here, a kind of unquenchable longing perhaps most famously captured in Proust's grand project to outwrite his memories. What it comes down to is, as Manguso has it, “an inability to accept life as ongoing.” It is to say “STOP... Hammertime” and it is that hammer splitting life up in the before and the after. The before becomes finite, and thus within reach of the writer. In the meantime, of course, the after laughs sardonically and accumulates.

Tom McCarthy's whole writerly project, then, it seems now to me, is a project to Stop and inhabit Hammertime eternally, to luxuriate in it. He attempts to do this by bathing himself exclusively in the recessional, by ignoring real life and forever writing its artistic counterpart. However, as he is well aware, “when the narrating cursor catches right up with the rendering one, when occurrences and situations don’t replenish themselves quickly enough for the awareness they sustain, when, no matter how fast they regenerate, they’re instantly devoured by a mouth too voracious to let anything gather or accrue unconsumed before it, then we find ourselves jammed, stuck in limbo: we can enjoy neither experience nor consciousness of it.” His solution: to feed on the carcasses of his precursors. To McCarthy, the best alternative to inhabiting Hammertime is to bask in second-hand Hammertime. Such a sentiment is not so far removed from Fernando Pessoa's memorable verdict: "Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life."

[bug · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book really sheds light on McCarthy's works. it was nice to flesh out themes I picked up on from reading his novels

[Michael Vagnetti · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essay and interview questions on the subject of suspended or “recessional” time in writing, and many peripheral concepts related to it: death, transport, interregnums, buffering. A dynamic and sporting dialogue, this is like being mounted on a head camera as the author and associates slalom through a history of writing. (That thing that seems to have been forgotten, or perhaps never known, pushed out of the scene by the puffery of “literature.” We were cheering for the wrong moments, from the wrong seats.) Gloves smack poles, and patchy ice is navigated: rationales and counter-rationales, repetitions, remainders, echoes, reversals. What I adore about McCarthy’s approach, here and elsewhere, is that it seems to invite you dangerously into a series of irresistible futures for writing that are not-quite-yet expressed.

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

For me, Tom McCarthy is right at the bleeding edge as novelist and thinker!